What’s more — what looked like a David-Goliath battle between Microsoft and Linux now has Goliath crossing over to David’s side. It started with the Microsoft’s alliance with Novell, and its attention-grabbing presence at the recently-held Linux Asia in New Delhi. While Linux distributors such as Red Hat and Novell see it as a sign of acknowledgment that “Linux is now a mature technology”, Microsoft contends that it has customers that have servers running on different operating systems and with interoperability becoming an issue, it had to step in to solve the problem for them.

Competing with Linux once filled Microsoft partners with dread, but now many are taking on the open source operating system with growing self-confidence -- and success. Here are the tactics for winning the fight.

When companies embrace an open source project, getting good support is one of the key factors.

Companies may want a solid, for-profit vendor providing support when they embrace an open source project. One shortcut to checking on a support company's qualifications is to find how many of a project's core developers, the ones who commit code to the code base, are employed by the support firm. But the history of support for the PostgreSQL database offers a cautionary tale.

Aonix, a provider of solutions for safety- and mission-critical applications, announced a new “zero-cost” license model for its ObjectAda for Linux product. Recognizing the expectations of the Linux community, Aonix has introduced pricing for ObjectAda 8.2 for Linux that emulates what is used for its industry-leading PERC product line. This price model focuses on customer service packs rather than development licenses. ObjectAda 8.2 for Linux provides a full complement of mature Ada technologies with an integrated Eclipse-based environment for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core and most equivalent x86 Linux distributions.

If you can’t beat them why not join them. This could well be Microsoft’s new mantra. For the first time ever Redmond Giant Microsoft will be rubbing shoulders with its arch rival, the Penguin (Linux mascot) at Linux Asia 2007. For quite some time Microsoft has been concerned about the growing open source movement, the increasing appeal and adoption of Linux in enterprise servers and by governments. Participation in the Linux party, starting on Wednesday in the national capital, attests to the fact that Microsoft is worried about competition from the open source community.